A visitor to South Yemen in the years immediately after independence would soon realise that this was an embattled republic, at once cut off from many of the interactions that states normally experience and at the same time itself committed to radical changes in other states. Few airlines bothered to call at Aden, in contrast to the busy passage of colonial times. The port was almost paralysed, and the great passenger liners no longer landed their droves at Steamer Point. The shops of Tawahi and Crater which had relied on tourism and the British base were depressed. Consumer goods were short. No new buildings were under construction and existing ones were in increasingly poor shape. Few lifts worked. There was no foreign private investment, and foreign aid from governments or multilateral agencies was minimal. Entry into and exit from the PDRY was difficult. A dramatic caesura in South Yemen's commercial and political relations with the outside world had taken place. From 1976 onwards, it became an offense for a Yemeni to speak with a non-Yemeni without official approval.

The signs of the republic's own militancy were also not hard to see. On the mile-long avenue of Maala, hitherto housing the families of British servicemen, placards hung outside the offices of guerrilla groups now officially welcomed in Aden – the PFLOAG, the PDFLP and the PFLP. Without such public display, but equally enjoying quasi-diplomatic status were representatives of other guerrilla and opposition groups – Eritreans, North Yemenis, Iranians, Iraqis, Chileans. A visitor to a hotel might find himself accosted by men claiming to have liberated large swathes of southern Ethiopia, or by the representatives of an underground grouping from Saudi Arabia.